At some point most idealized lovers become ordinary human beings. With the reappearance of this reality, a restlessness born from too little alonetime also becomes apparent. Now each partner has to return to their individual concerns in life. Couples who successfully handle this impasse do so usually through a renegotiation of the amount and condition of time spent together.
As individuals in a relationship evolve, so does the couple itself. People constantly transform one another. Sex may sometimes be hit-and-run, at other times a union so deep it feels biological. Commitment can be a joyous sacrament or a chain around one's neck. Alonetime allows us to reflect and sort things out. It is not necessarily a way to escape from bonding, for often we find our way back to someone else during alone contemplation, and forge stronger commitments.
Perhaps the poet John Donne said it best when he wrote to his lady love that he wanted "to teach you I am naked first." This great composer of love sonnets was claiming a need to know himself better and then to take on the challenge of their love.
Creatively Alone
We all know about the lone, creative artist. Solitude is an important route to creativity; indeed, research on creative and talented teenagers suggests that the most talented youngsters are those who treasure their solitude. However, the artist in all of us must risk disconnection, for forging a happy and worthwhile life—and navigating through that life fully and gracefully—is itself a creative act.
How can we measure the value of alonetime to a creative work life? Shrinking leisure time, and mental and physical exhaustion, are by-products of our accelerated work shifts. We all know people—if not ourselves—who cancel dates and say, "As soon as I get home, I'm going to sleep." I'm surprised at how the popular long lunch hour has been replaced by a lunchtime muffin at the desk followed by dinner next to the computer. Even breaks in the workday are rapidly disappearing. People today, caught in a struggle to produce work at the rate demanded by society, never consider the lack of alone moments. Once they do, they may decide to take control of their professional life by self-demoting, plateauing or turning down promotions, career shifting by changing to a less-pressured field, or employing themselves.
What Alonetime Offers
Life's creative solutions require alonetime. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems. Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers. Letting myself slide into reverie has proven extremely productive when I'm stuck with a problem. When one of my patients presents a dilemma, focusing head-on isn't what typically resolves it.
The natural creativity in all of us—the sudden and slow insights, bursts and gentle bubbles of imagination—is found as a result of alonetime. Passion evolves in aloneness. Both creativity and curiosity are bred through contemplation.
We need to unshackle aloneness from its negative position as kin to loneliness. Remove it from battles with bonding and relationships. Make its message part of the social norm! Then uplift it from its lowly place on the mental health shelf. The relief provided by solitude, reverie, contemplation, alone and private times is inestimable. Remember that love is not all there is to psychic well-being; work and creativity also sustain health.
Alonetime is a great protector of the self and the human spirit. Ultimately, we might follow the message of every practiced meditator, who suggests living each moment as a new moment, with greater sensitivity to one's thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations. That is the real message of alonetime, and it is through that profound self-awareness, that inner aloneness, that our lives will flower.
From The Call of Solitude, by Ester Buchholz, Ph.D. Copyright 1997 by Ester Buchholz. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster All rights reserved.
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